


Middle Ground

by Ahziel



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Angst and Fluff, Dick meets Jason for the first time, Gen, Good Parent Alfred Pennyworth, Jason Todd's implied self-esteem issues, Teen Titans-era, The very beginnings of brotherly bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:01:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23321362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ahziel/pseuds/Ahziel
Summary: “I’d rather go a few rounds in the ring with Clayface than endure Bruce's brooding expression across the table.” Dick dropped his pitch in his signature gritty Batman-impression.“Dick, you should know that I had every valid reason for keeping case information secret from you. Also, I’m still disappointed in you for dropping out of Harvard Law. And you’re still fired from being Robin. Please pass the salt.”He paused, then asked bitterly, “Sound about right? Granted, I’m a little rusty on my impressions, but I think I hit it on the jaw.”“Master Richard,” Alfred disapproved.“You’re right, it’s unrealistic; he wouldn’t say please. How about,pass the salt, or you’re fired?”For a moment, Alfred was quiet.“Master Jason would like very much to meet you,” he finally said, tone carefully even.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Alfred Pennyworth, Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson & Jason Todd
Comments: 34
Kudos: 402





	Middle Ground

**Author's Note:**

> Self-indulgent piece that borrows from a mess of continuities.

From Dick's vantage point at the far end of the winding lane leading up to Wayne Manor, it was almost like nothing had changed. The gardens looked exactly the same (dreary), the spear-topped fence as menacing as always. It was eerily as though Dick had accidentally stepped back in time. Before the fight ever happened.

There was no use lingering here in the proverbial doorway. He twisted the throttle and accelerated his bike up the long drive to the enormous above-ground garage (practically hangar). Since the day was drawing towards evening hours, it was more than likely Bruce was already in the cave gearing up for the night's patrol. Alone. Under his jacket's collar, his neck prickled. What were the odds Bruce was already watching him through the security cameras? 

Once inside the garage, Dick put down the kickstand on his bike and hung his helmet on the handlebars. Despite its ostentatious size, the above-ground garage was quiet, like always. It wasn’t used nearly as often as the one in the cave—only when Bruce needed to take his ritzy Rolls-Royce or stretch limousine to public events. Though he’d be willing to bet Bruce was tracking his every move through the camera blinking in the upper left corner. That way he’d know which rooms to avoid while Dick was here.

Self-righteous jackass.

On the far side of the massive garage, the door to the living quarters of the manor opened and Alfred stepped through.

“Master Richard,” he called. His words echoed in the chamber, but like a punch to the gut, Dick was viscerally reminded of stitches from a careful hand, morning mugs of cocoa and a wit so dry even a Gotham thunderstorm couldn’t saturate it. _Home_.

It was difficult to shove down the sudden upwelling of homesickness. 

“Hey, Alfred. Sorry to drop in unexpectedly. Left some of my stuff here when I moved out and thought I’d swing by to pick it up.” ‘Moved out,’ Dick thought, was a very delicate way of phrasing it. The lanyard of his keycard dangled from two outstretched fingers as he waved it for emphasis. “Happy to see I still have security access through the gate.” 

It had been meant as a joke, but it fell flat under Alfred’s imperious brow.

“As long as I draw breath, you will always have access to this manor,” the butler said. There was a touch more steel to his voice than normal.

In Dick’s chest, there was a hard knot that never went away (not since the falling out), and it seemed to get bigger and bigger with each passing day his commlink’s Gotham channel went unused. But when Alfred spoke, it unraveled itself for the first time in months. Only slightly, but enough that he finally felt more like a welcomed guest than a trespasser sneaking in through the backdoor.

“Thanks, Alfie. I’ll be out of your hair quick.”

“Would you be opposed to staying for dinner?” Alfred asked, moving aside to let Dick pass. “I'm in the midst of preparing the chicken casserole I remember you being so fond of when you were younger. It would be a shame to miss it.”

Dick laughed. It was an ugly sound. 

“Low blow, Alfred, using my weakness against me like that. Too bad I’d rather go a few rounds in the ring with Clayface than endure Bruce's brooding expression across the table.” He dropped his voice in his signature gritty Batman-impression. _“Dick, you should know that I had every valid reason for keeping case information from you. Also, I’m still disappointed in you for dropping out of Harvard Law. And you’re still fired from being Robin. Please pass the salt_." He paused, then asked bitterly, “Sound about right? Granted, I’m a little rusty on my impressions, but I think I hit it on the jaw.”

“Master Richard,” Alfred disapproved.

“You’re right, it’s unrealistic; he wouldn’t say please. How about, _pass the salt, or you’re fired?”_

For a moment, Alfred was quiet.

“Master Jason would like very much to meet you,” he finally said, tone carefully even.

Dick almost tripped over his own feet. 

“The new kid?” he blurted. “I don’t know, Alfred…”

“He is very young,” Alfred said, "and desperate to impress Master Bruce. He looks up to you greatly, though I’m sure he’d never say so to your face. If you are truly so pressed to return to the Titans, I believe a quick face-to-face introduction—at the _least_ —would be both doable and overdue.”

Dick ran a hand through his hair and increased his pace up the grand staircase, taking it three steps at a time to put some distance between them. “If I see him, I’ll say hi, okay?”

To his relief, Alfred didn’t follow him up the staircase.

Wayne manor was notorious for its confusing layout and vast number of empty rooms. In those dark early days after his parents’ murder, when Dick had first come to the manor as a traumatized and scared little boy and Bruce had been too focused on tracking down Zucco to make time for him, he’d made a game out of exploring the house to keep his mind off things. So many drawing rooms and sleeping chambers with their contents preserved for decades under heavy sheets… it had been a veritable maze. The perfect adventure for a curious kid. But a lonely one, especially for a boy who’d grown up in a trailer with his parents and his circus friends never more than a stone's throw away.

For a while there, after the murders, he’d only had his stuffed elephant plushy, Zitka, to keep him company. Outside of taking him in from the foster home, Bruce hadn’t known what to do with him.

Maybe he still didn’t.

Dick felt himself growing morose and shook the thoughts off as best as he could. In and out, that had been his plan, and he was sticking to it. If he focused, he might even be able to pretend there was a chance Bruce didn't know he was here the moment his feet crossed the property line.

When he got up to his room, he hesitated with his hand resting on the doorknob. An awful thought had just occurred to him. What if Bruce had disassembled his room? Or banished its contents from sight with those heavy protective covers that covered the furniture in half the manor? It would be a terrible confirmation of how easy it had been for Bruce to toss him aside. 

Get a grip, he told himself, and pushed the door open.

Nothing had been changed. 

Like, at _all._

Even the bed was unmade, as if Dick had just rolled out of it this morning. A layer of dust coated every surface, but at least everything was still there. His mathlete trophies. The books on his nightstand he’d always claimed he was going to finish at some point but never did. Even a few items of clothing still lay scattered around the floor. Evidently, Alfred hadn’t been in to tidy up. He took a few slow steps into the room, scanning its contents with fresh eyes.

There was the ugly antique armchair by the bed where Bruce had once sat and read him stories when nightmares about his parents’ deaths kept Dick awake. There was the wardrobe where he’d proudly kept the first formal suit Alfred had hand-tailored for him. There was the trophy from the National Junior Mathletes competition—one of the few extracurricular events Bruce had been able to attend.

Dick sat down heavily on the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands. He felt like he'd walked into a mausoleum.

“Your room is a total mess.”

Dick looked up; a young teenager slouched in the open doorway, hands jammed into his red hoodie. He had a mop of black hair and some freckles, and he was very obviously in the midst of an awkward growth spurt that gave him oversized hands and feet, like a growing puppy.

“Excuse me?”

“You deaf? I said your room is a total mess.” The kid shrugged with assumed nonchalance. “I mean, I get you left in a hurry and all, but geez. Ever heard of drawers?”

“You must be the new kid,” Dick said, resigned. “Jason, right?” 

Jason lifted his chin stubbornly. “That’s the name; don’t forget it.”

Dick rolled his eyes. “How could I? It’s splashed over every newspaper headline from here to Jump City.” Briefly, he wondered if Alfred had sent him up after Dick. That would be just like the conniving old man. “How’d you know I was here?”

Jason shrugged and breezed into the room, going over to the desk where Dick’s trophies were displayed to casually inspect them. “Saw you on the monitors. I was in the cave, doing some training with Bruce when I saw you drive up.”

Clearly, he was lying. Bruce never trained without all participants wearing the proper workout gear to minimize chance of injury, and besides: if Bruce was putting him through his paces at all, Jason would have been soaked with sweat. Dick had to actively work to keep his eyes from rolling.

“Okay, well. Hi. I’m Dick Grayson.”

“The first Robin. I know.”

 _First_ , Dick thought. There'd been a subtle emphasis placed on the word. “... Nice to meet you. Good luck with Bruce and all that.” He stood up and pretended to be busy moving things on the desk around, hoping the kid would take the hint and leave.

Naturally, he did the opposite. Jason stepped further into the room and balled up his fists like he was preparing to take a swing. “I’m gonna be the new Robin, you know. B gave me permission to go out into the field with him next month. I’m really good with the grapple gun and I’m hitting the targets nineteen times out of twenty and B says I have a strong right hook.” Jason said it all very fast, as though reciting from a precious list of qualifications he’d been keeping a mental tab on and obsessively reviewing.

“Good for you,” Dick said shortly. When he’d been Jason’s age, he was hitting the bulls-eyes with throwing discs twenty-nine times out of thirty... and that was on a bad day. “If you don’t mind, I need to find something—”

“So I’m not giving it up. You can’t be Robin again. Sorry to tell you, but the mantle’s passed on.”

What had Alfred said? ‘He looks up to you greatly’? Yeah, right.

Dick realized his grip had tightened on the back of his old desk chair to a painful degree and consciously relaxed his fists.

“I don’t know if Bruce has given you the powerpoint on Robin’s origin story yet, but Robin will _always_ live on in a part of me. Another kid taking up the cape and name doesn’t change that.” Realizing how terse he sounded, he made an effort to inject some false cheer into his tone. “And besides, you must not read the papers very much. I go by Nightwing now. So do you mind dropping the hostility some? I’m not here to take up the pixie shorts again—I’m just grabbing something I left behind on accident.”

“Oh,” Jason said. The tension visibly drained out of his shoulders and his expression opened up a little. Huh. He was actually a cute kid when he wasn’t in your face being a combative brat. “Okay, then.”

“Great. Well, like I said, nice to meet you.” It was another obvious dismissal. 

Jason left his place hovering by Dick’s trophies and came over to stand next to him. He was only just up to Dick’s shoulder in height, but it was obvious he had quite a lot of growing left to do.

“What are you looking for?”

Dick tried not to sigh. “It’s...ah, something personal.”

Jason smirked. “Left some x-rated mags lying around and didn’t want Alfred to find ‘em, huh?”

 _“No,"_ Dick denied emphatically. "No, it’s a poster that’s very dear to me. I left it by mistake.”

Jason furrowed his brow. “You came all the way back to Gotham...for a musty old boy-band poster?”

Was his eye twitching? Maybe. “Actually, it’s a poster of my family and I in the circus. Before my parents were murdered. We didn’t take a lot of family photos, so it’s one of the few things I have to remember them by.”

“Oh.” Jason actually looked abashed for a moment. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine. You haven’t seen it, have you?”

“Nah,” Jason said, flopping on his back on Dick’s bed with a _whump_. “B doesn’t really like it if I go in here. I only entered it once to see if you’d left any of your Robin tools lying around that I could take.”

Dick instinctively bit back the 'No codenames above the cave' that wanted to spring forth. Force of habit. “Great,” he sighed in a gusty exhale. After a moment, he sat down next to Jason. The bedsprings complained under their combined weight. “Guess the drive out here was for nothing, then.”

Jason’s head popped up off the bedspread. The curls on the back of his head were a little wild. “Hey, what’s the story behind the T-Rex in the cave? And the giant penny? Is it true you guys were hunted on Dinosaur Island?”

Those stories came from memories so long ago Dick barely remembered them. “Yeah, we were. Got out of that scrape just fine, though, and with a keepsake to boot. Hasn’t Bruce told you the stories before?”

Jason pouted. “No. He doesn’t tell me much about the old days. Just says I have to focus ‘n stuff in training. So I just read up on the case files when I can.”

Dick hesitated, but he’d never been able to avoid an invitation to perform. “Then... I’m guessing he hasn’t told you about the time Penguin broke into the Gotham Zoo to steal a cassowary and set all the animals loose in the process?”

“No!” Jason said, shooting up to his knees. “What happened? Is that how he got that big scar on his back?”

Dick launched into the story, spurred on by Jason’s wide eyes. It had been a long time since he'd actually thought about that case. In the beginning of telling it, he had to backtrack a few times and edit some details. Jason didn't seem to mind; Dick was just surprised to learn the kid was actually a good listener with an apparent love for stories. While Dick was in the midst of acting out the climactic part where Bruce had to go hand-to-hand (talon?) with Penguin’s (by then mutated, of course) cassowary, there came a quiet cough at the door.

Alfred stood there, two china cups of hot tea and a row of biscotti neatly arranged on his serving tray. “Ah, Master Dick. I’m glad to see you decided to stay a bit longer after all—and met Master Jason, to boot. I thought you both might enjoy some light refreshments to hold you over until dinner is finished.” He presented the platter.

“Wait, I’m not—” Dick started.

“Thanks, Alfred!” Jason cut him off, immediately drawn to the biscotti. Probably still had hunger pangs from growing. With crumbs falling from his mouth into the lap of his sweatshirt, he turned and directed his wide teal eyes on Dick. “You’re gonna stay for dinner, right? I have so many questions about some of the case files. And you haven't finished the story yet." Sensing that his eagerness had been too transparent, he composed himself into the cocky demeanor he'd put on when he first stood in the doorway and mocked the state of Dick's room. "But you've probably got to get back to Jump. So. Whatever, I guess. Maybe next time."

Dick wavered, pinned between Alfred’s arched brow and Jason’s carefully aloof expression.

“...I guess I can stay for dinner.” He sent a warning look at Alfred. “But I _really_ need to head back to Jump after.”

“Nonsense,” Alfred said briskly. “The interstate traffic will be horrendous at that time of night. I’ll make up your room with fresh sheets—heaven knows they could use a good starching.”

“Cool!” Jason said, leaping up off the bed. He checked himself again and dampened his excitement a few degrees. “Well, I’m just gonna finish my workout, then. I’ll see you at dinner, Dick.” He nodded at Alfred. "Alfred."

Dick was annoyed that he found the brusque manner adorable. It was so clear who he'd picked it up from.

“Bye,” he managed unhappily. He waited until the kid sauntered out of the room (snatching a handful of biscotti and his cup of tea on the way) before turning an accusing eye on Alfred. “You totally set that up, didn’t you?”

Alfred passed Dick the remaining cup from his platter. A strong, malty smell rose in wisps of steam from the delicate china—it was Earl Gray, Dick’s favorite. “I may have mentioned you’d dropped by when Jason wandered in to the kitchens. He’s a good boy, if a little...willful, on occasion.”

 _“Knew_ he wasn’t working out,” Dick muttered, but drank the tea anyway.

“Regarding the reason for your visit…” Alfred reached inside his dinner jacket and pulled out a long, thin tube from a pocket sewn into the lining. “I believe this is what you were looking for?”

 _“You_ had it?” Dick asked, popping the cap open so the rolled up paper inside slid out onto his palm. There it was, in all its glory: the Flying Graysons. The glossy color had faded with the years and the edges were starting to look more yellow than white, but it was still in remarkably good condition.

“When it became clear you were set on forging your own path, I put it in protective storage so the moths couldn't get to it.”

Dick shook his head wonderingly. “And you just remembered that after I'd come all the way up here? To think I used to wonder where Bruce got his craftiness from.”

Alfred sniffed. “Well, I should certainly hope I taught him more than that.” He took back the half-drunk cup of tea and began to walk away, his back one straight line of perfect posture. “Now, if you don’t mind, I would appreciate your assistance with preparing the rest of tonight’s meal. I am an old man, you know."

Dick grinned. “You still keep your oatmeal cookies in that jar on the third shelf?”

“Of course.”

“Then I’d be happy to escort you to the kitchens.” 

Dick slid the poster back inside the tube and tucked it under his arm, cradling it close to his body as he followed Alfred out of the room. Now that he had it in his possession, the knot in his chest came undone a little bit more and he breathed a bit easier despite the awareness that Bruce was still lurking somewhere in the manor. He clutched the poster tighter to his chest. No matter what happened in the future… no matter how he and Bruce fought… no matter who took on the mantle of Robin… at least he’d always have a reminder of what had given him the strength to start down this path in the first place.

**Author's Note:**

> Please consider leaving a comment if you enjoyed.


End file.
